Archive for the ‘April Fool’ tag

Barrett-Jackson’s spring Moon Base 5 auction has been attracting collectors to Earth’s nearest satellite since its inception three years ago, and this year was no exception. The sky was definitely not the limit for these bidders; the auction house realized $525 million on the sale of 88 lots. The top seller was a 1975 Bricklin SV-1 that brought $46 million, a record for the marque.

The fully-restored Safety Green Bricklin, known for appearing in the 1975 Bricklin brochure, as seen above, had won Best of Show at the 2033 Pebble Beach Concours, and had been invited to Villa d’Este and the Mare Tranquillitatus Concours. As usual, cars from the Seventies brought top dollar; other big sales included a 14,000-mile 1976 Cadillac Seville, a CCCA-certified New Classic that brought $23 million, and a 1977 Levi’s Edition AMC Gremlin that sold for $19 million.

“Collectors are, to their credit, finally appreciating these Seventies classics,” said Barrett-Jackson spokesman Poisson “Punch” d’Avril. “Today’s discriminating buyer is bypassing all of the ‘cliché’ cars – the Gullwing Mercedes, the Duesenbergs, the Ferrari Californias – and discovering the joys of robust bumpers, colorful stripe kits and elegant opera windows. These cars are a welcome reminder of the era of the gasoline-powered automobile.”

Bricklins, with their colorful fiberglass-reinforced acrylic bodies, “suede-like” upholstery and Ford V-8 gasoline engines, have seen particularly sharp rises in value lately. Experts expect that prices of these cars may reach a peak next year, with the 100th birthday of their creator, Malcolm Bricklin.

Long abandoned in an uninhabited area of Gale Crater, the Mars rover Curiosity has found a new home on Earth – in comedian Jay Leno’s extensive collection of classic and antique vehicles.

“The opportunity came up – I mean, not the rover Opportunity, that one’s still lost after the Great Marsquake of 2018 – but the chance came up to buy Curiosity, and I thought, what the heck, why not?” said Leno, 87, from the glass jar that houses his disembodied floating head in a nutrient bath. “I get people telling me all the time that I should buy this or that old vehicle, so since retiring last year, I’ve decided to go ahead and just buy everything everybody says I should buy. Plus, it’s nuclear-powered, so it fits right into all the alternative-power vehicles in my collection.”

Curiosity, launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in November 2011 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, landed on Aeolis Palus in the Gale Crater in August 2012, 13 years before the first successful Mars colony. A Boeing-built radioisotope thermoelectric generator powered its six independently articulating wheels over the rocky surface of Aeolis Palus as the rover analyzed the Martian atmosphere and rocks, looking for signs of native life and microbial life. Initially scheduled for a two-year exploration mission, NASA scientists extended the mission indefinitely in December 2012. However, the near-total defunding of NASA three years later left the rover essentially abandoned about 2,000 kilometers from the closest colony.

After water speculators found the Mars rover Spirit – mysteriously knocked on its side and rendered immobile – two years ago, the hunt has been on to find Opportunity and Curiosity. Frequent dust storms – along with limited archival information about the exact locations of the rovers, thanks to the massive data wipes following NASA’s defunding – hampered the much-publicized expedition parties led by Elon Musk and others, but Leno reportedly had help from an assistant to the Martian governor, a man named Hauser, and another man known only as Kuato.

Leno’s restoration team inspects Mars rover Curiosity.

Shipped back to Earth aboard Leno’s personal interplanetary yacht, Curiosity remained remarkably well preserved during its 36-year stay on Mars, thanks to the thin atmosphere and minuscule amounts of water on the Martian surface. “Maybe I should have just left it there and transported the rest of my collection to Mars,” Leno quipped. “This thing’s showroom fresh – that is, if they would have sold these babies back then.” Leno is reportedly now looking for the Earth-based control systems for Curiosity and intends to fit a mount for his glass jar so he can take Curiosity for a spin on the streets of Los Angeles, where his collection is based.

As is tradition in the collector-car world, a quarter century typically marks a vehicle’s transition from “used” to “classic,” so for a look back at the Class of 2013, that is, the cars turning 25 years old this year, let’s dig up some old photos we took at that year’s New York International Auto Show.

We’ll start off with the Shelby GT500 above, one of the highlights from the revived pony car wars of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Billed as the most powerful production V-8, the supercharged 5.8-liter aluminum-block dual overhead-camshaft engine was initially expected to put out just 650hp, but later SAE testing pegged it at 662 horsepower and 631 pound-feet. Backed by a Tremec 6060 six-speed manual transmission and a carbon-fiber driveshaft, the GT500, which Ford introduced for the 2013 model year, was reportedly good for a 3.5-second 0-60, 11.6 seconds in the quarter mile, and more than 200 MPH top speed.

Of course, the GT500 started at about $54,000 and got about 15 MPG (city, 24 highway) at a time when Americans were still recovering from the Great Recession of 2008, so Ford also had a more economical sporty car, the Ford Focus ST. The successor to the much-lauded SVT Focus, the ST also relied on boost – in this case a turbocharger – to pump more ponies from its engine: 252 horsepower and 270 pound-feet from the EcoBoost four-cylinder, reined in with a Torque Vectoring Control system. Also like the GT500, the ST came only with a six-speed manual transmission, but unlike the GT500, the ST started at about $24,000 and returned 23 MPG (in the city, 32 on the highway).

The GT500′s main competition was, of course, the Chevrolet Camaro ZL-1, which borrowed the 580hp supercharged 6.2-liter LSA V-8 from the Cadillac CTS-V, tweaked a little to fit the fifth-generation retro Camaro. Introduced in 2012, the ZL-1 offered both the Tremec 6060 six-speed manual and the Hydra-Matic 6L90 six-speed automatic transmission, which featured a manual mode. Both manual and automatic versions ran the quarter-mile in 11.9 seconds, but Chevrolet made much ado about the ZL-1′s Nürburgring lap time of 7 minutes, 41.27 seconds, about on par with the Porsche 911 Turbo S.

Sometime late last week, the breathless e-mails started rolling in. The gist: Senator Chuck Schumer thinks you’re rich and wants to levy a special tax on all collector cars! This will destroy the hobby and must be stopped!

Included was the text of an authentic-looking press release.:

Washington, D.C. – AP. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) held a press conference today in the Capitol’s rotunda and stated that he is in the process of drafting a bill that will create a federal tax on all collector, antique, historic, special interest, hot rods and race cars…”I’ve never heard of a poor person owning a Corvette, Ferrari, Deusenberg [sic] or Cobra…”

The language was credible, but it didn’t take very long to track down the source, an all-April Fool’s edition of the Shelby American Automobile Club’s newsletter. In addition to the Schumer piece, it included “Polka Dancers have lower rates of Colon Cancer,” one on a 40-MPG 1969 G.T.350, a 1968 G.T.500KR outfitted with a perpetual motion device, and one linking Shelby expert Howard Pardee to Charlie Sheen.

Due to the widespread belief that the Schumer piece was real, the author, Shelby historian Rick Kopec, later released the following statement pointing out the joke:

SENATOR SCHUMER “TAXING CLASSIC CARS” NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE REVEALED AS ONLY AN APRIL FOOL’S PRANK

The Shelby American Automobile Club’s annual April Fool’s gag reached a much wider audience that anyone could have predicted. Initially a four-page newsletter was e-mailed to every member. It contained stories about a perpetual motion ’68 Shelby, a ’69 G.T.350 that supposedly got 40 miles per gallon and a bogus front page recreation of The New York Times, dated March 28th, that had two stories. One was a hoax about purported tax legislation being prepared by Sen. Charles Schumer, which would tax every collector car, antique, hot rod and race car in the country. This was, of course, concocted out of thin air. But it was, on the surface, believable, and it hit numerous hot buttons of car owners.

As soon as some SAAC members read this, they immediately went into full “Paul Revere mode,” posting the article on a wide variety of Internet car forums. Once on those forums, readers swarmed like angry killer bees, both posting angry comments about the unfairness of the concept and spreading parts and pieces of the original article in e-mails and postings. It was the classic definition of something “going viral.”

When readers on some forums recognized the whole thing as an April Fool’s joke and posted this, other readers seemed to look right past the warnings. We now know how Orson Wells must have felt after his 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast resulted in traffic jams as panicked people tried to flee New Jersey.

While we enjoy a good April Fool’s prank as much as anyone, we never envisioned that this one could spread so quickly or so widely beyond the Shelby American Automobile Club. We deeply regret if taking this story seriously has caused anyone any undue distress or embarrassment. To keep more of that from happening, we would greatly appreciate it if you could forward this message to as many car enthusiasts as possible. If they forward it to others who can forward it to even more people, maybe this second message will catch up with and overpower the first one.

And finally, please do not contact Senator Schumer’s office. He already has his hands full with real issues of importance.

Best regards,

Rick Kopec
Shelby American Automobile Club

We expect the whole incident to soon be recorded on Snopes for posterity.

This year marks the centennial of one of America’s best-loved and most influential automobile designs of all time: Of course, we’re referring to the Reeves Octo-Auto. As the vehicle that made Columbus, Indiana, the automotive captial that it is today turns 100, fans around the globe are lining up a year’s worth of celebrations.

“I think it goes without saying that the Octo-Auto is the most important vehicle that the Reeves Pulley Company ever produced,” said Barnabas Trimalchio “Bunty” Reeves, a descendant of company founder Milton O. Reeves and president-for-life of the Octo-Auto Owners and Preservation Society, or OOPS. “In fact, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the Octo-Auto was the most important American car ever produced. Aw, heck, it’s probably the most important car the world has ever produced, and one of humankind’s most stunning achievements. I mean, can you imagine if four-wheeled cars caught on?”

Automotive historians have long marveled at the genius of Reeves’s design. In a world where conventional wisdom dictated that automobiles should have four, or perhaps three, wheels, it was Reeves who broke the barrier with his idea for an eight-wheeled automobile.

“Somehow, Reeves just knew that eight was the magic number,” said Wallace Takenail, the noted automotive historian whose book, “Crazy Eights: Milton O. Reeves and the Reinvention of the Automobile,” is considered the definitive biography of the celebrated inventor. “It might be apocryphal, but the story goes that the idea occurred to him one day while he was putting on his roller skates. He just happened to count the wheels, and – bingo, the light bulb went off!” Takenail said. “He realized that, if you needed eight wheels to support a human being, you’d need at least that many to safely support an automobile, which is generally much heavier.”

Reeves experimented with his eight-wheeled idea; One early prototype, with five wheels on one side and three on the other, was disappointing, while another, with seven wheels on one side, led to an accident during a test run at Indianapolis Motor Speedway that nearly took the inventor’s life. But when he arranged four wheels on each side, he realized he had found the magic formula. His invention immediately took hold and the Reeves Pulley Company prospered, leading it to become the multi-billion, multi-national auto producer it is today.

The highpoint of this year’s celebrations is expected to be the unveiling of a statue of Reeves at his Rush County, Indiana, birthplace, with what’s anticipated as the largest gathering ever of all the surviving 1911 Octo-Autos. That takes place August 24, which would have been Reeves’s 147th birthday. “We’ve got a 2011 Octo-Auto running as the pace car at this year’s Indianapolis 500, and we expect that some of the major concours will have some announcements to make pertaining to Reeves in the coming weeks,” Bunty Reeves confided.

“We’re pleased to be helping to honor Milton O. Reeves and his accomplishments in this landmark year,” said Bruscoe Schrader, a spokesman for Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. “I mean, after all, we owe him a debt of gratitude. We wouldn’t be what we are today without him.”

So a couple weeks ago, when I was out Fridays and nobody could reach me, I was actually traveling out West to pick up the latest addition to the Strohl family garage, my new motorhome!

See, whenever we’ve gone to Hershey in recent years, we’ve always had to stay in a hotel. But what’s a swap meet experience if you’re not camping on the field, selling your junk parts on a folding card table and cracking on everybody who walks by wearing a sandwich board? So we set out to find a vintage motorhome that would not only haul our junk parts to Hershey, but one that would also grab attention rolling down the highway.

It made the cross-country trip back home to Vermont just fine, though it got a little low on blinker fluid around Buffalo, I had to make a U-turn in Utica, and I creamed a cow around Cleveland (thus the gaping hole in the grille). It was a square cow, too. Weird.

I got big plans for it too. First up, I’m going to ditch that big gas hog V-8 in there and build up one of those Crosley four-cylinders I bought a couple years ago for it – gas is still expensive, you know. I’ll have to replace the cow-creamed grille, and I want to install a four-burner propane grill, so I’ll combine the two and mount the grill in the grille (“Yo, dawg! We heard you like grilling, so we put a grill in your grille so you can grill while you, uh, drive…”). I’ll turn the side-mounted basketball pole around so we can shoot some hoops. And I need to find one of these. Stop by and see us at Hershey – we’ll be in the Plaid Field!

We’ve just received confirmation from executives at Crosley Corporation that after a 57-year hiatus on producing automobiles, the company has secured financing with the federal government and will return once again as an automaker in early 2011.

In a deal that has been months in the making, the Obama administration’s auto industry task force, frustrated with the current Big Three’s halting attempts to produce a fleet of green automobiles, decided to go ahead and fund an outside company with experience in the auto industry to construct such a fleet of affordable and efficient automobiles. According to sources, the task force spent an entire week coming up with a list of independent automobile manufacturers still in existence, but ruled out Studebaker for its decidedly fuel-inefficient XUV, and ruled out Packard for its incredibly expensive V-12-powered concept.

Reportedly, it was task force member A.F. Day who recalled that Crosley still exists as an appliance manufacturer, now located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (Another branch of Crosley’s former company still produces radios in Louisville, Kentucky.) Day approached Crosley officials with a $2.2 billion loan guarantee, which is earmarked for a new factory in the Winston-Salem area (though other sources state that the factory could possibly be built in Alabama or even near Cincinnati). Day will also work with Crosley officials to choose an industry leader to head up the new company; sources suggest that Roger Penske’s name tops the short list of candidates.

As you can see from the teaser photo at the top of this post, which was released to the media this morning, and from our spy shot above, it appears that the new Crosley Automobile Corporation, which is expected to file papers of incorporation soon, will quickly enter the market by rebadging a Toyota product, the iQ, which is expected to hit the American market shortly before the Crosley’s expected launch date. However, sources tell us that the Crosley will differ from the iQ in that the Crosley will offer an all-electric drivetrain with lithium-ion batteries designed to fully charge in about 10 minutes. Range is expected to be about 300 miles, and top speed about 80 miles per hour. No official word on where the battery technology and electric drivetrain is expected to come from, though rumors pinpoint North Carolina-based battery company and defense contractor Saft for supplying the lithium-ion batteries.

Pricing so far has not been announced, but expect an entry-level price tag less than $10,000. Dealership franchise agreements are being hammered out as we speak. It is expected that Crosley will work with Toyota on developing a station wagon version for sale sometime in 2013.

Those crazy PR flacks at Lotus have been at it again. The joke? An Elise variant that’s useless. Get it?

In a delightful bit of April Fools’ prankage, Lotus public relations debuted its first Elise-based pickup truck.
“The Lotus Elise Load Lugga is an Elise-derived flatbed that seeks to secure a slice of the ever-growing worldwide market for sports car-derived pickup trucks,” the release said. “Utilizing a Briggs and Stratton pull-start diesel engine uniquely supercharged by Lotus’s own engineers, the Elise ‘Load Lugga’ is the first Lotus to marry advanced four-wheel-drive technology with the Lotus design philosophy of ‘performance through light weight.’ A useful 5kg payload, together with an optional towing hitch offering a further 10kg of load-hauling capacity, ensures that the new Lotus will be equally at home carrying a small bag of sugar or an expanded polystyrene surfboard.”
Lotus goes on to note that its big, chunky tires increase ground clearance to an all-terrain-conquering four inches, and they are gunning for a 0.0026 percent share of the U.S. pickup market this year.

(This post originally appeared in the April 6, 2006, issue of the Hemmings eWeekly Newsletter.)